An excursion into certain areas of art, computers, philosophy, text, zombies, alchemy, metallurgy, music, food, creativity, pataphysics, politics, France where I worked as a cultural civil servant (yes, I do know that this is appalling), Berlin where I live and work for me, England where I come from, and so on... this may change.

Monday, April 01, 2013

Blast from the past ---Monday, January 05, 2009

Pinter clarifies for us how to live with Zombie and quantum physics

Harold
Pinter, who died at Christmas (2008), wrote in 1958 and expanded in 2005
something which makes clear that the worry about "yes and no, true and
false" etc. at the heart of any Zombie, Post-Modern or scientific
discourse (which must recognise the tentative nature of reality) is
swept away by the simple recognition that we have different
responsibilities at different levels of thinking, of acting in and on
the world.

1958: "There are no hard
distinctions between what is real and what is
unreal, nor between what is true and what is false.
A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can
be both true and false."

Nobel Prize speech of
2005: "I believe that these assertions still
make sense and do still apply to the exploration
of reality through art. So as a writer I stand
by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I
must ask: What is true? What is false?"

Is there, however not a contradiction here? No. Both statements are simultaneously true (smile).

To talk about ’Pataphysics (of which there are more than 100
definitions) usefully, we have to get rid of certain notions of which
the most important may be that any way of thinking about the world
should be testable within that world. Was non-Euclidian geometry
testable in this sense before its physical manifestation in gravity? Did
imaginary numbers make sense "externally" from mathematics until it was
shown that the behaviour of elementary particles depended on the
totally imaginary square root of -1? With 'Pataphysics it gets even
weirder. It is entirely internally consistent to say that ’Pataphysics
is not only physically manifest everywhere in all universes, but that it
also changes the physical world, becoming externally consistent just
because it says so! Some will find this nonsense; some may say that it
is useful nonsense; and others may agree with me that this science of
the absurd, the study of the laws governing exceptions, the science of
the particular, is the most liberating and creative catalyst there is.
Others who have agreed range from Tom Stoppard to Jean Baudrillard, from
Umberto Eco to Marcel Duchamp, Ionesco, Miró, Genet.

Members of the Paris-based Collège de 'Pataphysique include artists and
scientists from all disciplines, philosophers, dramaturges,
technologists, doctors, historians, futurologists, film-makers,
astronomers, paleo-botanists, roboticists and more. The current
Vice-Curator, Lutembi, is a crocodile. The Collège itself consists
almost entirely of a delirious but deeply important bureaucracy, like
Freemasons on LSD. Subcommittees include ones for the fine and ugly
arts, of between-the-lines moralities, of realisable incompetences, of
anagrams, inadequations, badger-brushes and of the inexact sciences.
Certain thinkers, artists, and scientists from long ago, such as
Leonardo, are also pataphysicists in virtue of their plagiarism by
anticipation. Joan, in the Beatles’ Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, “was quizzical / studied pataphysical / science in the home”.

Here an interest must be declared: whilst your present reviewer does not
know the author personally, we are both office holders in the Collège.
Normally a disqualification, this lends the review, pataphysically,
extra objectivity. It just does. And anyway since this is a pataphysical
review, what else did you expect?

The subtitle, A Useless Guide, paradoxically tells us at once
that this is no shrinking violet of a book, but one that intends to
claim a necessary status for itself as a seminal text. However since all
texts, even those as yet unwritten, must be considered as seminal to
’Pataphysics, we must ask ourselves if this book is an exception to that
rule (and more pertinently should one buy it?). If it is, it isn't. If
it isn't, it is. So the answer must be: yes and no. I hope that this
review has helped the reader decide.